Cronenberg's short meter mastectomy
Yesterday, the Rotterdam International Film Festival posted on his YouTube channel a nearly ten-minute short film by David Cronenberg, a cult director who, in recent years, seemed to have moderated his radicalism, well, or at least transferred it to more elegant areas. The new film refutes this, called “The Nest”, and will be online until September 14 - the big exhibition about Cronenberg, which is overseen by the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, the Rotterdam-based festival, will last just as long.
Resources devoted to pop culture and cinematography have expanded the "Nest" with the joyful note of NSFW - in the modern world it is the guarantor of high views during working hours, collecting friendly teams in front of monitors. Indeed, eight minutes and forty seconds (that is, 99% of timekeeping) in front of us in the frame is a naked waist-high woman shot with a subjective camera — a technique that we most often see in porn. But with the agility of an experienced cheater at about a tenth second, Cronenberg does so that the viewer does not have a trace of his thoughts about sex. Short film - pseudo-documentary record of the patient's consultation before the mastectomy, judging by the scenery, underground; The doctor behind the scenes is either a surgeon or a psychiatrist. The woman in front of him is obsessed with the idea of getting rid of her left breast as soon as possible, because, in her opinion, it is not the breast, but the mimicking her wasp nest, alien and malicious. In addition, the woman is played by Evelyn Brosh from "Tom on the Farm" of another amazing Canadian director, Xavier Dolan.
The first thing that comes to mind is that Kronenbreg shot for the EYE Film Institute a digest of his work, a teaser video of his own retrospective show under the slogan “oh, be quick, cheap”. More or less about this, he removes his whole life - about human phobias, parasites, transplants and mutations of either the body or the mind; in the bizarre world of his films, from bodily horror to psychological drama about psychoanalysis, there are no boundaries between reality and fantasy, because, well, there are no such boundaries. If you think that you have a hornet's nest in your chest, then you can, of course, understand, make an ultrasound, get to the bottom of a tumor, duality of consciousness, denial of your own physicality or the right to dispose of your own body. Or to the extent that sometimes a nest is just a nest.
In fact, this short film, with an open finale and a typical viral understatement, is only part of a large whole - this is essentially the trailer for Cronenberg's debut novel "Consumed: A Novel", which will be released in early September and to which you can already pre-order on "Amazon ". The beauty of the title is fascinating (I want to regret a potential translator) - it contains a hint of a consumer society, a psychological absorption of an object, and a literal devouring from the realm of horror.
The synopsis is not far behind: a pair of freelance journalists, Naomi and Nathan, take on two stories from the yellow press. She, Naomi, is investigating the death of a Marxist and philosopher Celestin, apparently killed and half eaten by her lover, marskist and philosopher Aristide. He, Nathan, goes to Budapest to shoot a report about an underground surgeon, whom Interpol is hunting, sleeping with his patient and becoming infected with a rare disease. How the semi-eaten Marxist and the clandestine surgeon are related, we partly learn from the short film The Nest.
Among other things, Cronenberg promises to mix social media, geopolitics, 3D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, sex and cancer into this storyline. Simply put, the director composed a book on the state of the modern world (thanks, perhaps, to the inspired Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo). And considering that his own voice sounds in the Nest behind the scenes, you can be sure that he still feels comfortable in the role of either a surgeon or a psychiatrist.